Fashion's Post-Drop Future
Hype with no clothes? Digital collections are buzzier than physical ones, says Neuro's Clement Balavoine.
Hype has a huge problem.
Clement Balavoine realized that drops, collections of physical clothing meant to build buzz for brands, are not only extremely wasteful.
They’re also not even the best way to build hype.
“I really quickly realized that that system, that process, was completely broken,” Balavoine, the French designer and digital artist behind the label Neuro, told me of his experience working at London fashion houses. “The amount of waste, of time, of money, of energy and, obviously, fabric.”
“Because I had a lot of friends working in the video game industry, they were starting to use 3D software for pattern making,” Balavoine says.
Merging his gaming development inspiration and physical fashion experience, Balavoine designed the very first digital fashion collection in 2015.
But his second collection, Solventus, in 2019, was when things really clicked.
“It blew up on the internet.”
“People thought it was real,” Balavoine says of Solventus. “Women were reaching out to me and saying, like, ‘I want that skirt, I want to buy that top!’”
Instead of a physical collection, Neuro’s drop was all digital.
“I was like, ‘No, no, everything is fake, it’s just to showcase a new process,” Balavoine says. “That’s when I realized that the whole thing was working, just promoting everything digitally until the very moment when someone wants to buy it and then you actually produce it and sell it.”
Balavoine’s goal was zero waste. The unexpected byproduct was hype.
“By using one 3D environment that we build, we can prototype, we can visualize, we can produce and we can promote,” Balavoine explains. “An entire collection can exist fully digitally and be promoted and sold without even being produced.”
That’s when brands started taking notice.
“We could have sold thousands of pieces,” Balavoine explains. “We talked with a lot of companies…but they just wanted to use us as a marketing tool to show that they’re sustainable.”
The big brands sense a trend, Balavoine says. “It’s like, ‘Hey, look, we’re just using digital fashion because now it looks cool, it looks innovative,’ but their processes remain the same and it’s just very sad.”
So Balavoine fights against modern waste in a different way: through narrative.
For the French label Hamcus, Balavoine designed digital clothing for a character named Raven who battles misinformation and modern media technology by attacking satellite dishes to save the world from fake news.
“These collections are built like a movie or a video game, so every detail has a story,” Balavoine explains. “If there is a pocket, it’s because the character is going to use it in the story.”
For Solventus, the most recent digital collection for Balavoine’s own label Neuro, the entire narrative was built around renewable energy.
Balavoine created a no-too-distant future world just for the Solventus collection where renewable energy failed and activists fled cities to small farms powered by wind turbines and solar panels.
All the pieces in the digital collection were designed specifically for those characters to live, work and fight back inside their fictional narrative.
“We do things because they need to be made,” Balavoine says. “Otherwise we don’t make them.”